My old HP is starting to get cranky in its old age; won't always eject the disc. I was planning to replace it with a Blu-Ray burner anyway as part of my new build, but I think the urgency has risen on this item and I may need to move quickly.

1. I need to be able to read/write all DVD and CD formats, including blueray.2. I think I would like to avoid HP products. I have had two HP products that have begun to fail this year.3. I occasionally use Lightscribe. Slight preference given to any models that have this feature.4. Front-panel space will be limited in my new system so I want to consider external devices. I can buy long cables and make room on my desk. I have no preferences as to SATA or USB 3.0 unless there are known problems with either method.5. There is no tight budget on this item. Let's say a couple hundred would not make me break a sweat.

For now only reading on my Asus laptop. I don't yet write to Blueray only because this burner in the desktop workstation doesn't have that capability. I would like full read and write capability for all formats unless it costs a million dollars.

My case currently has only one available 5.25" slot. But in the new configuration (a month or so away), the DVD burner will probably have to be an external device.

Last edited by BIF on Fri Nov 30, 2012 2:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Item 4: "Limited" to what? Zero slots? A DVD/BluRay burner only takes up one external drive bay. Almost every case (including some mini-ITX cases) has at least one 5.25" bay.Item 5: Have you priced any bluray burners? You're definetly not talking about $200, even for an external drive.

I would have more confidence in the reliability of an internal drive myself.

I always just grab the cheapest Samsung/Lite-On 5.25" I can find when building PCs for friends/family. Mainly because I "once" had a problem with a Pioneer drive (that worked brilliant for reading/burning) with many a game's DRM.

Having said that... just realised my current one is a Pioneer drive.. and I haven't had a problem with it in 6 years... and I didn't even know what brand it was till I pulled up the device manager!!!!

Honestly, if you can find one for under $50 on sale, it may be a better investment to go BD than to go with a DVD burner. Otherwise, buy whatever Samsumg/Lite-On/Asus is on sale this week. This one looks like a safe bet:

Regarding the anti-HP preference. I think most optical drives available today are made by LG and Liteon with a few more made by Samsung and maybe Benq. There used to be more manufacturers, but most now seem to rebrand either LG or Liteon. Companies like HP, Sony, Pioneer, Asus, and even the vaunted Plextor, now all rebrand other OEM drives as far as I know. This is to say that there are really only a few options to consider.

If you don't want to burn Blurays (only read them), then you might as well grab a Bluray reader/DVD burner such as this and save a bit.

If you want to do Blu-Ray burning, I think the OEM drive with the most features is something like this LG. Only OEM drive that can burn BXDL media that I know of.

Thank you for the great responses; I'll peruse your links later this evening.

Additional info for DPete and anybody wondering why I was asking about external drives:

Front panel will be limited due to other things being added for the new system. For example, hot swap bays for SSD and Hard drives. That's 3 or 4 bays right there, depending on which bays I choose. If I install water cooling, that'll take up more space. At some point, either the camera card reader and/or the DVD burner will have to be moved out of the case.

I will consider an internal DVD drive if it's absolutely necessary, but I'm looking forward and I see that I may not have room. If you want the gory details, then please see my recent thread in the "Cases" subforum.

I've had rather lousy luck with LiteOn DVD burners these past few years. They work great when they're new, but things go downhill fairly quickly. Everything from simple flakiness, to corrupted burns, to inability to reliably eject, to one drive where some of the adhesive they used to attach the rubber pad to the spindle oozed out onto any disc that was put in the drive, fouling some discs so badly that they needed a thorough cleaning with isopropyl alcohol to make them usable again. Maybe their BluRay burners are better, but they are currently on my "avoid like the plague" list as a result of the above issues.

I try to avoid Sony on principle (not a big fan of their business practices), but their hardware seems to be OK.

LG has generally been good... I switched to them when I got POed at LiteOn. No complaints (so far).

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

I've used Samsung and LG with good success. A Samsung DVD-RW in my main PC has ripped over 700 CDs and DVDs without a hitch, and I've had it for about 5 years now, never had a problem burning either. LG drives in custom built PCs for others haven't had problems either but I don't know how much use people put them through. LiteOn may have gotten better, but I avoid them too just because prior to the above drives, I'd had a few that just went bad. They always just seemed cheaply built compared to others. That was back when LiteOn was noticably less expensive than other brands though.

If I was going for an external drive I would avoid slim drives personally unless it really needs to be portable for a laptop, their speeds are about half the 5.25" models, but that's just me. Also, if you do buy a bare drive and an enclosure, be sure to read user reviews carefully, it seems like some external enclosures have problems actually writing discs even if they read fine.

I have an eSATA external hard drive (Seagate) that I've never really been happy with. If I hooked it up to one of the eSATA ports on the back of the m/b, I had to enable an extra interface in the bios (jmicron if I remember correctly). That added extra time to the boot process. If the computer went to sleep or I put it to sleep, it wouldn't find the external drive upon awakening. If I just used one of those cables that would plug into a SATA slot on the motherboard and had the eSATA plug in on the 'slot' cover it had the same problem with sleep/suspend. It is a couple of years old so maybe newer eSATA products are better behaved.

I also have a USB3.0 hard drive dock that I'm much happier with. Using a WD green drive for backup purposes, I can't tell the difference in speed from the time it was installed internally. Benchmarks would probably show some difference but it works fine so far as I can tell. USB3.0 would probably be more bandwidth than any optical drive could saturate for a couple of years anyway.

I'm looking at an external bluray as well. For the number of times that I actually need a optical drive and the number of machines I have sitting here, putting an internal drive in each machine doesn't make sense anymore. Only one machine needs the ability to playback bluray, but being able to burn backups to bluray density media is very appealing.

Side note: I don't get all the hype about using blurays for backups. You can buy a 1TB USB3.0 external hard drive for less than $100 that can read/write much faster than bluray, can hold 20x more data than even a dual layer bluray disc, and it can be "infinetly" written over instead of having to buy a bunch of discs. It's just easier IMO. Not only that, but I've heard many problems with people not being able to properly play bluray movies on their computers and that an actual bluray player is just the simpler and easier route. Screw bluray burners, optical media is dead.

DPete27 wrote:Side note: I don't get all the hype about using blurays for backups.

But for archivals of data that happens to also be backed up to another media (SSD, HDD, stone tablets), optical media can still have a place, if only a minor one. Plus, it stores flat and isn't bothered by static electricity or EMP strikes!

However; for clarification, I don't plan to use my new drive for "backups". I just want the most flexible device that I can get, in the event that I ever need to write bluray disks. Leaving for the Newegg store soon; I hope it's not crowded!

If planning to use for archival purposes (and the data is important to you) make sure you do your research on which media to buy. With some of the cheap stuff, you'll be lucky if your disks last more than a few years. I don't know much about it myself, but I remember reading that Panasonic makes reasonably good bluray media. No idea if there are others or how much of a premium you have to pay for decent archive-grade bluray media.

DPete27 wrote:Side note: I don't get all the hype about using blurays for backups.

But for archivals of data that happens to also be backed up to another media (SSD, HDD, stone tablets), optical media can still have a place, if only a minor one. Plus, it stores flat and isn't bothered by static electricity or EMP strikes!

It's a lot easier to store off site as well. Heck a little encryption and you could mail it to your off site storage without worry. Send multiple copies if you don't trust the post office.